Letter Written on Prison-Issue Toilet Roll in Women's Suffrage Auction

The Bonhams Deeds Not Words: A Women's Suffrage Collection online auction running November 10 – 20 features a single owner collection of rare suffragette memorabilia.

The sale includes letters, photographs, memorabilia, postcards, books, and hunger strike medals that all tell the story of the women who fought for Votes for Women in the suffragette colours of purple, green and white.

A unique item in the collection is a letter written on prison-issue toilet paper by York suffragette Anne Seymour Pearson from Holloway Prison in 1913 (estimate: £2,000–£3,000). Arrested en route to confront Lloyd George at the Houses of Parliament, Pearson wrote to her husband from behind bars in pencil overwritten with ink, a common practice among imprisoned suffragettes. It begins by complaining that prisoners are not allowed to have notepaper or newspapers but "...it suddenly came to me in the night that I could get some lavatory paper!! A brilliant idea was it not?...", and complains of her harsh sentence of two weeks in Holloway Prison. The lot also includes her scrapbook, full of ephemera and other material charting her life of militancy.

Other highlights include:

• a color advertising lithograph poster for The Suffragette newspaper designed by suffrage campaigner Margaret Bartels who in 1912 was fined 2 shillings for chalking slogans on the pavement at Herne Hill, and became known for interrupting church services at Westminster Abbey with her cries of "Let's pray for Votes for Women" (estimate: £2,000 - £3,000)
• a first edition of The Women's Suffrage Cookery Book (Women's Printing Society, 1909) by Aubrey Dowson (estimate: £600 - £800) sold to raise money for the cause and also provide quick recipes so campaigners could spend more time campaigning, and featuring a recipe by activist Dora Russell, wife of the philosopher Bertrand Russell "for cooking and preserving a good suffrage speaker... If this recipe is carefully followed, the speaker will be found to preserve her flavour to the last moment, and will do her utmost to make the meeting a success."
• a rare series of six humorous postcards by Reg Carter of Southwold of suffragette window smashing, including a 1912 card sent to suffragette Kathleen du Sautoy Newby who had newly been released from prison for this exact offence (estimate: £400 - £600)
• the Hunger Strike Medal awarded to Mary Phillips in 1909 (estimate: £10,000–£15,000) in its original box with a rare letter of presentation signed by Women's Social and Political Union honorary secretary Mabel Tuke and a portrait photograph
• correspondence to Mary Phillips from the leaders of the WSPU, 1907-1916 (estimate: £15,000 - £30,000)